Most of my old friends might think by this title of “Pink Floyd” with the identical title from the B side of their album “Meddle”.
Anyway, the Echoes I wanna talk today is Microsoft’s latest platform offer for telco’s. Mary-Jo Foley writes in her ZD-blog that summary I’ll quote at first:

“1. Echoes will assign a local mobile number to each Windows Live contact
2. Via its Address Book sync capabilities, Echoes will push these new new contacts into any mobile phone (no client required)
3. The user will be able to compose an SMS or place a voice call to these contacts
4. Echoes will ensure text messages are delivered to Windows Live contacts as chat conversations, and replies will be sent back from Messenger as SMS
5. Voice calls can be connected through Echoes directly from the mobile to the Windows Live Messenger user’s PC
6. As the mobile user will appear always “online” to friends (using Echoes client emulation server), conversations also will be able to start from the Windows Live cloud, pushed to the mobile as SMS.”

some remarks on that:
1. The idea is simple and great. SMS and chat are basically the same:
short messages between 2 people. To combine computer chat with sms is just a extension to an other device.
They by Microsofts nature try to push only their own chat service (Messenger). Thats short thinking. Soon other providers will deliver the same with any chat system. Guess what the telco’s will choose?

Rumors told, that Salesfore is dumping it’s PC’s when the lease runs out and replace them by macs. All 4000. I’ve heard that from smaller companies already. Salesforce might be the first big one doing that. It is not only a good reference for Apple, it’s a good one for Salesforce too. Because it shows the platform independence of their business applications. (I suppose they only use their owns web based software)
So they replace the hardware by some more reliable low administration demand macs which will streamline their employees work.
Smart move at all.

The FAZ, Germans “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” reported yesterday in their article: “XING meets the borders of growth” (German), that XING has removed it’s advertisements from premium customer pages after massive protests in their forums. Many customer extensively use Xing as their online business card, their virtually profile. So is happened f.e. that (invisible to them self) other users saw their profile with ads from (in worst case) competition companies.

I did always suspect, that plain advertisement in the web is overrated. It is just a contribution to information overload. And more and more people will treat it as spam. So a business model based on advertisement will work well as long as someone pays for it. But if customers start to systematic avoid ads, advertisement business will meet it’s borders. Anyway, there are better ways to promote things like reputation or referral models.

Well, the New York Times reports about a simple PC-offer at Wal-Mart stores, running GOS, the Google Operating System. That is supposed to be a Linux version optimized for Google applications. But the main issue is it, to make yet an other try to release a end-user friendly PC without an operating system from Microsoft. The power behind that try is big: It’s Google combined with the distribution power of Wal-Mart. But even if the offer is a cheap one ($298 without Monitor) to get access to the broad low cost market, the PC will not stand for hardware power. And people with less money not automatically looking for less quality. And still there is to add the price for a monitor. With about $300 you might get a system inclusive Microsoft too.

Anyway, it is an other try to break the Microsoft Operating system dominance. Today you may get much for free, like Star-Office instead MS Office and via internet bunches of free web 2.0 software offers, like photo-sharing or community software. In general you can meanwhile design a home-office PC free of licenses. Although that attempt is a bit lousy, Microsoft (and other license software producers too) should be scared.

Happy Halloween

Edit ( Nov 14, 2007): Today announced ZDNet that this PC is sold out. That success cries for more. I would guess, other vendors will step in soon.

Next week I’m attending (together with Lars Trieloff) the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston (June 18-21) to announce the hosted service. The event is the former collaborative technology conference and it will unite the most important collaboration software companies with interested stakeholders.

It’s surely a plenty place to meet me. I’ll have a presentation at June 19, 5.25 am. And we’ll have a presentation point there to see the new Mindquarry Enterprise Server version 1.2. So meet me there:

The DEGUT conference, held in Berlin from April 20 to 21, is a local conference & trade show for entrepreneurs, consultants, banks VC’s and business angels around the topic of “getting started”. On Saturday, 21th, I’ll be on stage at 3 p.m. in hall 13 at a podium session with the zab, a Brandenburg agency for business development. The motto of the session is “innovation needs boldness”, which is (perhaps) a special German issue. 😉 Anyway, since Mindquarry is a spin-off of the Hasso-Plattner Institute, I got invited as a representative of a typical “Brandenburg success story” of a group of Brandenburg students, which founded a own company and how they got supported by local sponsors.

I think although that event is really a local Berlin event, it’s still a good opportunity to network with the local officials, look for goog partnerships and perhaps for new ideas and interesting people.

So if there is anyone who wants to meet me there, one free guest ticket is still available.